The prices of Solid State Drives using Multi-Level Cell NAND flash
have dropped
a lot recently. This is mostly due to Intel incorporating flash
memory using 34nm technology in its
newest generation of X25-M SSDs. This process was first
introduced late last year by IM Flash Tech, its joint venture with
Micron Technologies, but IMFT was only recently able to overcome mass
production problems in order to meet the quantities that Intel
needed.

Although MLC flash is fine for most uses, the corporate enterprise
market demands the faster speeds and higher reliability of
Single-Level Cell NAND. SLC flash is capable of much faster
write/erase speeds and cycle reliability than MLC flash, but costs
more for the same amount of storage. This has limited its adoption to
IT departments that require the highest long-term reliability
and lowest down time possible, or tiered storage uses in small and
medium businesses. The extremely low latency and fast access speeds
have made incorporating SSDs a high priority for IT departments eager
to improve performance at a low cost. SSDs are much more cost
effective than traditional 15k RPM hard disk drives, especially in a
tiered storage environment.

OCZ has been having a lot of
success with its Vertex series of SSDs using the Barefoot flash
controller. Made by Korean upstart Indilinx, the controller provides
random read and write performance that surpasses most of the rest of
the market. The Vertex
EX series pairs the Barefoot controller with SLC flash to compete
against Intel's X25-E in the enterprise market. Recently, OCZ
began using MLC flash from second tier manufacturers along with the
Barefoot controller to introduce slightly slower SSDs
in its Agility series at a much lower price.

The company is now looking to extend the same concept to SLC SSDs.
Instead of sourcing SLC NAND flash from market leader Samsung, OCZ is
partnering with other firms to bring the price of enterprise level
SSDs down. The current price of most 64GB SLC SSDs is $600 and up;
the new Agility EX 60GB drive will be introduced at a MSRP of $399.
At a price that is only two-thirds of the rest of the market, this is
a drive that many Fortune 1000 firms will be sure to consider.

“Though SLC has traditionally been more expensive than MLC flash
there are both performance and lifespan advantages to SLC based solid
state drives. It is for consumers that require the
extended reliability of single level cell flash that we are now
introducing the Agility EX series of SSDs,” stated Eugene
Chang, VP of Product Management at the OCZ technology Group.

“The Agility EX offers consumers the most cost effective SLC
solid state storage solution on the market, and when customers take
all the benefits of SLC into consideration the total cost of
ownership of these drives truly shines through.”

Intel has already announced that it will extend its 34nm
technology to SLC NAND flash chips at a later date. The second
generation X25-E drives are expected to launch at a lower price point
using Intel's proprietary flash controller. A 128GB X25-E model is
also expected to be introduced alongside its 32GB and 64GB
offerings. Intel is currently capacity constrained by IMFT and
has had trouble meeting market demand for its new generation of SSDs.
A 320GB X25-M model will be introduced once production ramps up
enough.

Comments

Threshold

Username

Password

remember me

This article is over a month old, voting and posting comments is disabled

One reason I have to wanting a hybrid revolves around the fact SSD isn't reliably recoverable. Magnetic discs can be removed, repaired to some degree and read from after damage. If NAND gets damaged, your data is SOL.

Add on the fact that NAND can get damaged in more ways than a magnetic disc, and you'll see my paranoia. You don't have to worry about shorts, static, airport security, etc., with magnetic discs.

A hybrid would also give you much of the performance benefits of NAND without losing the density of magnetic discs. A 6-8 GB NAND hybrid on top of a 1 TB disc would be pretty freaking fast.

While everyone should backup their data, how many really do? And how often do those that do?

Unless you have some sort of continuous backup setup, you're going to have periods of time where your working on new data that's not on your backup. If something goes wrong in that time frame, it's gone with SSD.

Running a continuous backup system on an SSD is an option, but you're already limited on space.

Hybrid would have the best of both worlds in the right proportion. No reason why it can't happen.

quote: Add on the fact that NAND can get damaged in more ways than a magnetic disc, and you'll see my paranoia. You don't have to worry about shorts, static, airport security, etc., with magnetic discs.

It's actually the other way around. The heads on a traditional HDD are much more vulnerable than a SSD.

Modern magnetic hard drives are able to withstand over 200 G's of force in use, over 800 not in use. Not far from the 700-1500 advertised by SSD makers, and well within the normal range of usage. Most modern laptop hard drives can prepare for impacts as well, so I don't think the heads are an issue anymore.

Meanwhile, what happens if pathways on the NAND die? How are you going to get the data off the spot you can't access anymore? Or if a NAND chip does crack, even minutely?

If it were a magnetic disc, you'd have a mature recovery process available to you, but who's going to be able to recover data off NAND without an atomic microscope?

Not to offend but the conversation was about important data. If you don't want to spend the money to get it professionally recovered it probably isn't important data. You know, data worth thousands of dollars.

If you want the best performance (HDDs aren't even CLOSE) and most rugged design, you buy an SSD. If you want to maintain data integrity, you BACK UP YOUR DATA. Professionally restoring data on a broken HDD costs much more than it costs to build and run a 3TB RAID-5 server. There's no excuse.

Who's going to send their magnetic harddrives off to recovery unless they're a corporation, hm?

Recovery firms charge not an arm and a leg, but six arms, eighteen legs and a couple pairs of balls for good measure. No private citizen can afford it unless they're independently wealthy, and even so that would be a waste of money if you'd just invested in a decent backup scheme.

And a corporation would run with mirrored/RAID5'd SSDs anyway, so if one unit craps out inbetween backup cycles, nothing is lost. You slot in another unit, the array rebuilds...and that's it.

There's really no advantage to HDDs anymore except for price, and capacity. Certainly not reliability.

Intel's SLC flash drives are warrantied for 1 petabyte of writes... That's a LOT of writes (1 PB = 1 million GB = filling the drive to capacity more than 16000 times over). And that's what the warranty is set at, there's going to be some margin for sure.

I can guarantee you, by the time you've written 1 petabyte to any HDD you care to pick, it's not going to be looking too hot anymore either.

So lifetime... Don't really get your point, mate. Do you regularly keep and use HDDs for several decades? Dunno 'bout you, but I don't use that 100MB drive I bought back in 1989 anymore.

If you have to rely on data recovery for anything, you're doing it wrong to begin with. I deal with dead drives in my servers and storage arrays all the time; I've never lost any data to a drive crash.

quote: Modern magnetic hard drives are able to withstand over 200 G's of force in use, over 800 not in use.

I'm not in a position to disagree with you, but my experience as a Customer Service Rep at a repair centre for Sony suggests otherwise. If a computer came in with a "clicking" hard drive, I would suspect the computer had been dropped. My job was mainly to contact the customers who had invalidated their warranty, but it was also to get permission to replace the hard drive, so I would have dealt with the majority (but not all) such cases. I can only recall one instance where a unit had been dropped and the HDD was replaced under warranty, although I think we were all suspicious that the customer should have been charged.On the other hand, I dealt with many dropped cameras, but I don't recall a single instance where the customer complained the pictures had been lost or corrupted as a result of the drop. How often have you dropped an MP3 player? Did it affect the music? I suspect not.

By the way, did you know that during WW2 the Allies actually had artillery shells that had "radar" fuses, which used valves, that would cause the shell to explode above the target rather than on impact. The valves where designed to withstand being fired. Apparently they were used to good effect during the Battle of the Bulge.

I've had my fair share of desktop hard drives turn up "clicking" and most of the time it wasn't from physical damage (in two cases, was my own tower computer which I knew hadn't been abused). In nearly all cases, I've had the drives replaced as defective without complaint from the manufacturer.

Laptop hard drives are a different matter entirely. Seems like no manufacturer will replace a drive under warranty if it has head issues.

Meanwhile, I've seen quite a lot of SD, xD, USB, and Memory sticks go bad. In one case, photos taken for reference in a lawsuit were lost (camera attacked and nearly destroyed while taking them) and an attempt was made to recover but didn't go anywhere. I've had one of my own USB drives go bad and it never left my desk. I've also seen numerous instances of camera memory going bad quickly from airline travel which I'm guessing is caused by the security machines but someone else made a good argument for cosmic rays when I brought it up one time on another forum.

Anyway, my point was that we're better off with the devil we know. We can recover from magnetic discs easily, but can't recover from NAND chips if something goes wrong.

HDs have controllers on them you know. The controllers are susceptible to all the things you just mentioned. If the board on the drive fails you are SOL unless you want to pay thousands of dollars you get your data back. But if the info on the drive was that important, you should have had it in a RAID 1/5/10.

You have a moot point. SSDs are better in almost every way than a HD, reliability included.

Controller can be replaced on an HHD easily by purchasing the same model drive, unscrewing the controller from the chasis and moving a new controller onto it. No data lost, will run like normal after-wards. I've done it three times and all three successfully.

Can you replace the controller on an SSD easily? Don't think so.

I think you guys are getting a little ahead of yourselves trusting these things.

"This is about the Internet. Everything on the Internet is encrypted. This is not a BlackBerry-only issue. If they can't deal with the Internet, they should shut it off." -- RIM co-CEO Michael Lazaridis